


new skin (to wrap myself in)

by groundopenwide



Category: Bastille (Band)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Asexuality, Character Study, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Pre-Slash, Second person POV, Self-Esteem Issues, Sexuality Crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:29:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,039
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23761594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/groundopenwide/pseuds/groundopenwide
Summary: You want to be normal—just once, you want to be normal.
Relationships: Charlie Barnes/Dan Smith
Comments: 15
Kudos: 23





	new skin (to wrap myself in)

**Author's Note:**

> did i just project my very specific experiences and mountain of sexual identity issues into this fic? hmm. maybe so.
> 
>  **note:** consent is a bit dubious throughout this, specifically in terms of an ace character not being 100% sure on their boundaries. if that sort of grey area is triggering for you, you may not want to read. 
> 
> be well, friends. ♥

I.

Nightclubs are strange. Liminal spaces, almost. Flashing lights, throbbing bass, clink of ice cubes in a glass, people touching, kissing, touching. No windows. Just mirrors, lots and lots of mirrors, so you can look at yourself and your thoughts, spread wide like dissected body parts across a table:

_I want to be here. I am allowed to be here._

But also—

_What am I doing here?_

A paradox. You belong, but you don’t. You like to hang out with your friends, and you like to dance (even if you look like a giraffe dressed in clown shoes when you do it), and you like the drink prices here and the burn of the vodka on its way down your throat. You’re twenty years old, and this is what twenty-year-olds do: drink. Dance. Tell your friends, loudly, how much you love them.

You don’t like the bodies. There are so many of them, packed in like the apocalypse is nigh and this is the underground bunker that will save them all. The mirrors multiply the bodies until there are a hundred, a thousand more, endless rows of faces. And all of the faces have hands, and the hands want to touch you, but you don’t like that. You don’t like the bodies or the hands. You just want to be like that Robyn song: dancing on your own.

“What’s your name?” 

She has dark eyes and red lips and smells like vanilla. She puts a hand on your arm and her nails flash white under the strobe lights. She’s drunk. Pupils blown, face flushed, feet wobbling in her high-heels. You don’t like her hand, but you’re drunk, and you want to be good. You want to be normal—just once, you want to be normal.

“I’m Dan,” you say.

“Dance with me, Dan!”

She pulls you in, arms around your neck. You put your hands on her waist like a robot. Up close, her lips look like they’re coated in blood. She grabs your hand and spins herself around, giggling, stumbling, falling into your chest, her breath hot against your throat.

_Be normal. Be normal, be normal, be normal—_

“You’re a good dancer,” she yells over the music.

You laugh, because you’re the worst dancer that’s ever lived and you don’t know what else to do. You just don’t know. So you laugh, and you laugh, and she starts laughing, too, and you keep laughing and think _where have my friends gone._

And then her tongue is in your mouth.

An electric shock, and not the good kind. Her nails dig into your shirt like talons. It’s not a kiss, it’s a raid, a plunder, all sloppy teeth and tongue and you don’t know what’s happening, you don’t know if _she_ even knows what’s happening. You try to kiss back, you try to be normal, but your head is a loop of _where have my friends gone where have my friends gone where have they gone._

You’re twenty years old, and this is your first kiss.

She pulls away, her eyes glassy and far-away. She’s just stolen something from you, something you can never get back, and she doesn’t even realize it. She doesn’t care. You watch her wander off into the crowd—into the bodies, so many _bodies—_ feeling like she’s just walked off with some integral part of you. You want it back.

II.

You start kissing people whenever you’re drunk. 

It’s her fault. The girl with the blood-red lips. She stole a moment from you, and now you’re trying to make up for it by making moments of your own, but they’re never enough and always too much and sometimes you think you like it but then you hate yourself the next morning. Just a kiss, every time, and yet you hate yourself all the same.

You kiss another girl in a club. Then another, and another.

You still don’t like the hands, but it gets easier, sort of. You just block it out like white noise, like the shit you have to see on the news every day. Ignore it and it isn’t happening. Ignore it and it doesn’t exist.

 _You’re a good dancer,_ they tell you, and you just smile and keep your hands on their hips.

Your American friend Este is turning 21, an age that’s meaningless here, but you go out all the same because you may not know romantic love, but you at least know what it means to love your friends. You do tequila shots and more tequila shots. You dance to Drake. You’re so drunk that for once, you don’t even care about the bodies. You dance, dance, dance and scream _happy birthday_ to Este at the top of your lungs. It’s fun. It’s so much fun.

When the hands touch your waist, you don’t freeze. You barely feel it. You’re numb with happiness. You don’t even realize the hands are male hands until you turn around and find thick eyelashes and broad shoulders and the ghost of stubble across skin.

“Hi,” he says. “I’m Jack.”

“Dan,” you say back.

Kissing Jack is good. It’s nice. You’re drunk, but Jack is careful with you. He kisses with patience, with intent. His hands are so big when they cup your face, and you want to stay, you don’t want to run this time, you want to keep kissing Jack, kissing him and kissing him, even though you know you’ll regret it in the morning.

When the lights come on, you don’t want to go home.

“Shall we go for a walk?” Jack asks.

It’s misty outside, the streets ringing with that two in the morning emptiness that you usually revel in from the comfort of your own flat. Jack offers his coat and the sleeves are a bit long, just enough for you to wrap your hands in them. It’s cozy, makes you feel important, makes you think that maybe this is good. This could be good. 

You walk toward nothing, Jack laughing while you ramble on, _it’s Este’s birthday oh my god it’s her birthday and I just left her I’m the worst friend ever,_ and then you’re on an overlook by the river and Jack pulls you in and tips your face upwards with a finger under the chin and says _can we make out now?_ and you say _yeah_ and it doesn’t feel like a lie.

But then you’re in an elevator, and then you’re in Jack’s hotel room, and your vision goes fuzzy and so does the truth, like when you’re showering and a little bit of soap drips into your eyes. Jack is on top of you and he’s still kissing you and that’s fine, that’s totally fine. What’s not fine is that he’s kissing you on a bed, and so many other things happen in beds, things that you don’t want to do, things you never want to do. God, why can’t you just be _normal—_

“I’m not having sex with you,” you say. It doesn’t sound convincing in the slightest, and you hate yourself a little bit.

“Alright,” Jack says. 

He bends down to kiss your neck, fingers drifting under your t-shirt. You’re still wearing his coat.

“I should go,” you say. You don’t know if you mean it. Everything’s so fucking fuzzy.

“C’mon, stay. We don’t have to do anything.” His fingertips are like ice against your stomach. You feel yourself shrinking, shrinking inside, even as your body reacts. “Stay.”

He leans up and kisses you on the mouth again. He does that for awhile, sucks on your tongue and brushes your hair back from your forehead, long enough that you almost forget. This is good. This can be good. You wanted to kiss him. This doesn’t have to be scary, it doesn’t—

Your phone rings.

“I need to—” you say, and sit up.

Jack heaves a sigh and climbs off the bed, disappearing to use the toilet. You answer the phone.

“Este?”

“ _Dan._ Where are you? I want to go home.”

“Okay,” you say. _I do, too._ “Okay. I’m turning on my location. Can you get here alright?”

“Yeah,” Este hiccups. “I’m with—I’m with Alex. He’s nice. We’ll find you.”

“Okay,” you say again. “Call me when you’re here.”

You hang up the phone. Jack is back. He looks at you with disappointment in his eyes. “You’re going.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Jack says. 

(You know he doesn’t mean it. They never do.)

III. 

Your mate Ralph jokes around, calls you a “party animal.” You are one, sort of. You like to drink and have fun. You like to sit on random sofas in random flats and talk to strangers (because the only time you’re any good at talking to strangers is when you’re drunk, or high, or both).

You haven’t kissed anyone in awhile. A year, maybe more. The guilt after Jack was too cloying, too thick, like having a plastic bag tied over your head. Suffocating. You felt like you’d committed treason. A traitor against yourself. You kept putting yourself in those situations over and over, like clockwork, when you knew exactly how they would end. You let someone put their mouth on your mouth when you couldn’t even figure out how it made you feel, if it was good or bad or somewhere in between. What was the point? What was the point of any of it?

You still don’t have the faintest clue what you want. You don’t know anything.

This party’s a decent one. You’ve had a few drinks, nothing crazy, just enough to take the edge off, and everyone here is nice—so nice. You’re chatting with a bloke called Noah. He’s had a lot more than you, and he’s a bit weird looking, with ears that stick out, but he’s funny and you like talking to him. He wants to exchange numbers, be Snapchat friends. You want to talk to him again, so you say yes. You can’t think of a reason not to.

You lose Noah to the party after that, but it’s alright. You’re still having a good time. You play flip cup with Ralph and some other lads you don’t know, eat cold pizza out of the refrigerator, talk to Kyle from your Music Production lecture. It’s a fun night. 

On your way out the door, Noah finds you again. His eyes are bloodshot, like he’s been off smoking in the loo. He sees you and his face lights up. “Dan!”

You laugh. “Hi.”

Noah wraps an arm around your shoulders. He smells like weed, but he’s still just as stupid cute as he was an hour ago. You don’t feel threatened by him in the slightest. _This is okay,_ you think. _This is actually okay._

You’re sort of expecting it, have been all night. Noah leans over and presses a kiss right to your lips, soft and fleeting, blink-and-you-miss-it. Your heart soars.

“Oh,” you say. “You kissed me.”

Noah laughs, claps you on the shoulder. 

“Bye, Dan,” he says. 

It’s fun. It’s easy. This sort of thing has never been easy.

But you never text him. And he never texts you. You want to text him, but you don’t. You can’t. The next morning, the guilt is back, and you didn’t even do anything, god, you _didn’t even do anything,_ what the hell is the problem? It was a peck. Something your Nan could’ve given you. 

_He was drunk. He didn’t mean it. He wouldn’t like me, not once he got to know me._ A million excuses, each of them tasting more bitter than the last. Self-sabotage at its finest. What are you so fucking afraid of?

The answer: all of it. 

You’re afraid of connecting with someone. Of loving them. You’re afraid they’ll love you back. You’re afraid to hand over your heart, even the tiniest piece of it. You don’t know if you’ll be able to handle it when the person you love decides they want something from you—something you aren’t able to give. 

You aren’t normal. You never will be.

IV.

You meet Charlie through your first job after uni. You want to be an English teacher, but you’re so young—too young. You aren’t ready to commit to that yet, don’t know if you ever will be.

So you get a job at a café brewing coffee and warming up croissants in the oven. When you walk in on your first day, there’s a short bloke waiting behind the counter. He perks up when he sees you.

“Hello!” he says, far too loudly for seven o’clock in the morning. “Are you Dan?”

You hesitate. “Yeah.”

“Oh, good. Would’ve been rather awkward if you weren't.” He grins, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Some of his teeth are wonky and overlap one another. “I’m Charlie.”

 _I’m in trouble,_ you think, and you’re right.

Charlie is a force of nature. He talks too fast and smiles too much and asks you questions that you don’t always know the answer to. He’s clumsy as hell and spills drinks all the time, butchers the spelling of people’s names when he tries to write them out on paper cups. He burns his espresso shots 90% of the time and cracks awful dad jokes that never fail to make you cringe.

And yet—

You like him. You’re living in a shit flat forty minutes away by bus because it’s all you and Ralph could afford, but somehow coming to work becomes the best part of your day. You’re always late for your shift, but it’s okay, because Charlie always has a black coffee and vanilla scone waiting for you when you get there. He’s always standing there with a giant smile on his face, like seeing you is his favorite part of the day.

A few months in, you shave your head because you’re tired of everything, especially yourself. When you show up for work the next morning, Charlie looks right at you and says, soft and full of meaning, “I like it.”

You want to kiss him. At least, you think you do.

You’re so screwed.

“Hey,” Charlie says one day, after you’ve both finished your shifts and are walking out of the shop side by side. “I was, um, wondering.”

He looks nervous, mouth pursed and eyes lowered. Your stomach does a backflip. “Yeah?”

“Do you want to hang out? Away from work, I mean. Maybe right now?”

“Oh,” you say. _Yes. Yes, yes, yes._ You can’t seem to rip the word from your tongue. Everything is always so much harder than it needs to be. “I’m—I don’t know.”

“It’s okay if you don’t,” Charlie rushes to say. “We can keep it professional, if that’s what you want.”

You don’t know what you want. You never do. And you’re _tired_ of not knowing—so, so tired.

“No, I—” You take a breath. “I do. I want to hang out with you.”

“Oh,” Charlie says. “Really?”

“Yeah.”

The two of you get fish and chips from the shop next door, then eat them on a bench in the park just down the road. You sit too close together, knees bumping every few seconds. Charlie’s mouth is shiny with vinegar.

“Are you seeing anyone?” he asks you, out of the blue.

The question wedges itself into your lungs, makes it hard to breathe. You pick at the container of chips in your lap. 

“No,” you say, but it doesn’t feel like enough. “I don’t—I’m not really into dating.”

“Why’s that?”

“I can’t—” A pause. You don’t know how to say it. All this time, and you’ve never spoken the words out loud before. How do you explain your feelings to someone else when you can barely explain them to yourself, most of the time?

“You can tell me,” Charlie says. “You don’t have to. No pressure. But I’m not going to judge you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

You believe him. You don’t know why, but you do.

“I just—I can’t give most people what they want,” you say.

He blinks. Tilts his head. “So?”

You laugh a little, self-deprecating, and look at your feet. “So, what? I’m not—I’m not normal, Charlie. Nobody should have to deal with that. Nobody _wants_ to deal with that. With me.”

“Dan.”

Charlie’s voice breaks on your name, makes you look up. His eyes are sad, so sad, and your heart feels like a rubberband, stretched to its breaking point. 

“Do you really think that?” He asks. “You think—what? That no one’s ever going to love you?”

You want to cry, all of a sudden. The tears prick at your eyelids like a million tiny needles. 

“I don’t know,” you say. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I _can_ even love someone like that. It’s all just—so confusing. How do you make sense of any of it?”

Your cheeks are wet. You sniff and wipe them with the palms of your hands, and then Charlie is putting an arm around you to draw you in, and you’re crying into his shoulder. You’re crying into his shoulder on a park bench, right where anyone could see.You’re getting snot all over his shirt and your container of chips has fallen off your lap and spilled all over the ground. You’ve hit the lowest of lows.

“It’s okay to not know. It’s okay,” Charlie is murmuring. He rubs your back like you’re a child after a nightmare, slow and soothing. You cry and cry until you don’t have any tears left. 

You don’t feel any lighter afterwards. Just empty. You pull away. Charlie doesn’t stop watching you, doesn’t even blink an eye at the sorry state of your swollen face. He takes one of your hands between his own and holds it tight. Your brain is a warzone, the dropsite of a nuclear bomb, smoke billowing out in a mushroom-shaped cloud.

“Sometimes I want to kiss you,” you say amidst the wreckage.

He squeezes your hand. “You can. Kiss me, I mean. If you want.”

You swallow past the brick in your throat. “And what happens afterwards?”

“I’ll still be here,” he says. “I hope you will be, too.”

**Author's Note:**

> i'm on [tumblr.](http://goodlesson.tumblr.com)


End file.
